How's Your Romance?: Concluding the "Buddies" Cycle by Ethan Mordden Page A

is another American doing the impossible.”
    It was Cosgrove with a paper bag over his head, complete with not only eye and mouth holes but ear hinges.
    “It is maybe your buddy, ja? Peter has warned me.”
    “Do you get air sickness up there?” the bag asked Lars Erich.
    Lars Erich took the bag off Cosgrove, saying, “Now see what a nice boy comes through, who wants to tease us with an American surprise.”
    “How about this one?” asked Peter, coming up to show us the old von Mata č i ć Scheherazade.
    “That is not a competitive performance,” said Cosgrove. “The classics are Sir Thomas Beecham and Fritz Reiner, acceptable modern readings are Bernstein and von Karajan, and the greatest of all is the Russian Svyetlanof with the USSR Symphony Orchestra.”
    “You will please find me that one,” said Lars Erich, “and one good Bartók, also the postwar Frenchman who sounds like clouds parting over the edge of the world.”
    “Messiaen,” said Cosgrove, more or less. Even the French find that name tough to pronounce.
    “And then we will already have lunch.”
    “Can we go to the green-pea place?” Cosgrove asked me as he marched off to fetch Lars Erich’s CDs.
    “This will be what?” Lars Erich asked me.
    “We generally go there after, because they have the best split-pea soup in the city. It’s a dive, but it’s quite close by.”
    “We go there,” Lars Erich decided.
    There was silence then, as Lars Erich reviewed his opera boxes and Peter just drank him in. Isn’t he beautiful?, Peter was, I believe, thinking. Wouldn’t you give up anything to have that on a platter? Isn’t he the prototype?
    Yes, no, and arguably are the answers. Meanwhile, I was thinking that more striking than Lars Erich’s body-god looks was the fact that he had a body-god personality to match: expansive, captivating, bossy. This is real danger. A beauty with nothing to offer but physical charm is no more than a date; a beauty who is personally gifted will have you risking your self-esteem trying to have impact on him.
    Cosgrove reported back, Lars Erich made his acquisition, and we fought our way through Tower’s irritatingly overcrowded ground floor into that strange neighborhood outside. This is lower Broadway, bordered by commercial establishments of no importance yet thronged every day of the week, especially by the young and built. One thinks of the Beach Parade out at the Pines: a show. Walking beside the bursting Peter and Lars Erich and the youthfully trim Cosgrove (who had that paper-bag head back on), I felt like the actor hired to supply jests in a college musical while everyone else in the cast has romances, models hot styles, and introduces the New Dance Sensation.
    What a relief to duck into the green-pea place and wrestle with those gigantic enplasticked menus.
    I launched the scene. “Peter says you train seeing-eye dogs,” I told Lars Erich.
    “You must say ‘guide dogs.’ The ‘Seeing Eye’ is a certain brand. A copyright, one will tell you.”
    “How did you get started on such a … well—”
    “Back in Germany, when I am growing up, my family are raising puppies which will be educated as guides. You know, they cannot be trained so young. They are a year first, and then trained. So we raise many, mostly shepherds, a few white Labs. Always, it is so sad when they leave, for it is necessary to surround them with love, to strengthen them for training. Without love, a puppy has nothing to live for, and then how is there the incentive for training? But we have put in the love, and then they go from us? It was a regular day in our lives, with my little brother and sister weeping and clinging. They are saying, ‘Can we just keep this one?’ Once, Harry hid puppy Törless’ toys, he is thinking that without the toys they wouldn’t haul the dog away. But they did.”
    “I have a puppy,” said Cosgrove, still in the paper-bag head, “and his trick is to untie shoelaces.”
    “Yes, it is so